Easy Access
by Cartographical
Summary: "It's just a pencil skirt, Castle. Are you really that easy?"
1. Easy Access 1

_This takes place in some vaguely alternate middle-of-Season-4 universe. Two-shot; the rating will go up for the next chapter, but if that's not your cup of tea you could probably go ahead and just read this as a standalone._

_For Cora Clavia, who wanted me to put Beckett in a pencil skirt. She was then nice enough to unceasingly harass me until I actually wrote it. Chezchuckles and Sandiane Carter helped with some horrifyingly relentless encouragement. I am honestly not entirely sure how I ever managed to produce anything without multiple people typing at me in bold capital letters._

x

* * *

"Morning, Kate."

Castle stares up from his chair. The man's voice is a little too friendly. His smile is a little too wide, considering it's seven in the morning. The line of his jaw is a little too pronounced, and his eyes are a little too bright.

Beckett's voice is a little too warm as she stands, smiles back at him. "Hey, Sam." She pivots to include Castle in their conversation. He pushes himself off the chair, joints still stiff and creaking from a long flight and not enough sleep. "This is my partner, Rick Castle." He can't help but feel a brief puff of pride at the word _partner_, but the pride deflates when he realizes that Sam has a good four inches on him. And he has a nice handshake, firm and cool and commanding. "Castle, this is Sam Cromwell, the prosecutor on the Lapinski case."

She'd spoken about the prosecutor on the phone with him over the past two weeks as he'd worked his way from LA to Seattle in a stop-a-night book tour. He knows she's spent most of her time prepping for the high-profile trial, but his incredibly comforting mental image had been of a somewhat doughy, pasty, middle-aged guy in a rumpled seersucker, not a man with clear gray eyes and a far-too-chiseled jawline. "Nice to meet you," Castle says, charitably. Beckett does say that in terms of prosecutors, Cromwell's one of the best. He can play nice in the sandbox. He can.

Cromwell's eyes flick over Beckett. If Castle were any less observant, he'd have missed the slight hitch of the man's breath before he lifts up a metallic gray Nordstrom bag. "You're not going to like this," he says. Castle does have to admire the prosecutor's ability to not pull any punches. Except, no, no he doesn't. He hasn't gotten to see Beckett in two weeks, he's dragged himself out of bed despite the jetlag to get a chance to be with her at the Precinct before she's whisked off to her day at court, and here's a guy with muscles and a jaw producing bags of clothing at seven am.

The way they left things – he was hoping to talk to her. Needed to talk to her. Wanted to talk about it on the phone, when she'd called him to run through the details of her testimony (ostensibly, at any rate), but he'd gotten as far as breathing "Kate" across an inhale before she'd said, "Later, Castle. When you get back," and he'd had no choice but to agree.

"I don't like it already," Beckett says, staring warily at the bag on the desk.

A dark burst of something like amusement flashes across Cromwell's eyes, and, if it were any other circumstance, Castle would feel impressed by him, because navigating a potentially angry Kate Beckett with such aplomb is no easy task. But the man must be used to dealing with Beckett, Castle thinks, a coil of jealousy winding tight and uncomfortable in his stomach, because Cromwell plows relentlessly ahead with a bravery that is as impressive as it is ill-conceived. "You need to wear this," he says.

_Duck and cover_, he can't help but think. _This is the exact moment they were talking about when they played those videos about the appropriate response to nuclear attack. _He quickly scans the room. He figures he can dive under Beckett's desk in a pinch. Hopefully it will protect him from the worst of the debris.

"Excuse me?" Beckett says. She squares her shoulders, plants her hands firmly on her hips. Despite the danger, Castle can't find it in him to move away from her; she has this pull when she's spitting anger like this, and he finds himself inexorably gravitating toward her, unable to hold himself away.

Cromwell shows no regard for delicate balance in which his life currently hangs. "Judge Marinski had a family emergency last night, so they switched us over to Cravitz."

_Just don't look into her eyes_, Castle wants to whisper, but he swallows it, kind of hoping that this situation _will_ end in a fiery explosion of doom that unequivocally proves that nobody but him should be bringing Beckett bags from Nordstrom. "So?" she asks, a sharp edge to her voice that's usually not there.

Cromwell shrugs. "Last month, I had a female cop show up in a power pantsuit. Laskowitz got four utterly ridiculous objections sustained, and Cravitz barely _acknowledged _my Motion to Compel."

"You're not serious," Beckett says, blinking at him.

"Look," Cromwell says, turning his palms up toward her. "The guy's a misogynistic dinosaur, and I'm not making excuses and I'm absolutely not saying that it's _right_ that he adheres to these archaic social constructs of femininity."

Beckett still looks supremely unimpressed. "But…" she starts for him.

He quirks half a smile, far too pleased. "But Cravitz is our judge, and that's not gonna change. And I'll do whatever it takes to get Lapinski behind bars. Will you?"

She glares. "Don't be manipulative, Sam," she snaps, but there's a soft edge of familiarity to the words that sets every one of Castle's spidey senses tingling.

"Just because it's manipulative doesn't mean it's not the truth," he counters.

Beckett stares down at the bag, then jerks her eyes up to his. "And, really, you thought the best way to get me to wear a skirt would be to _buy_ it for me?"

"Figured you might not have one that works. This was all pretty last minute." And then Cromwell grins, open and wide and entirely too nostalgic. "And besides. I owed you."

This is entirely unacceptable, Castle decides. He ponders his options. Should he punch the guy for assaulting Beckett's honor? Storm off in a compelling, manly way and hope she follows? Throw the Nordstrom bag onto the ground and find a lighter somewhere and burn it? In the end, he settles for shifting a couple inches closer to Beckett, close enough that their arms are almost brushing.

She sighs at Cromwell. "You did _not_."

He quirks half a smile at her. "Look – your body, your clothes, your call. See you at the courthouse in an hour, okay?"

"Fine, Sam," she says, sounding exasperated but a little bit too fond as the other man pivots and makes his way out of the bullpen.

Castle tries to use his yet-to-be-acquired powers of telekinesis to make the man trip and fall on his way into the elevator. It doesn't work.

"Calm down, Castle," Beckett says, without even looking at him.

He realizes he may or may not be glaring holes into the Nordstrom bag. But she should be indignant, certainly more indignant than he is; she should be bristling as she stuffs the offending clothing into the trashcan. "What kind of a guy buys a woman he's not dating _clothing_?"

Beckett turns, stares at him.

"That was a totally different situation. That was purely professional."

Beckett keeps staring, her face impassively neutral.

He needs to stand up for himself. "Things are different now," he says, and he tries to leave it like that, he does, but it's not working for him. "Other men should not be _buying you clothing_."

Beckett leans in towards him, lowers her voice to a hushed whisper. "Castle," she bites out, "you cannot start acting like a caveman just because we had... an Incident... two weeks ago."

"An Incident?" he squeaks, indignant. "An Incident? Is _that_ how you're referring to it?" There are a lot of ways he'd refer to the memory of her in his bed, the lithe, smooth lines of her body rolling rhythmically against him the night before he left for California, but _Incidental _is not one of them. "There are so many more descrip–"

She cuts him off. "I swear to God if you use the phrase 'made love' right now it will be the only _Incident_ we ever have." She looks like she wants to make him say _Apples_.

He huffs a frustrated breath of air. This is absolutely not how he expected this morning to go at _all_.

She seems to take his silence for something close enough to the end of their conversation, because she's grabbing the Nordstrom bag and walking toward the bathroom before he can formulate any of the responses bubbling in his brain. "I'm changing," she says over her shoulder. "I'll be back in a minute."

* * *

He's finally zoned out, his eyes closed, his mind blissfully blank, when he hears the click of her heels walking up to his chair, stopping just in front of him. He opens his eyes, and his first thought it how _unfair_ the world is, because she's standing in front of him in clothing that another man bought for her and fuck, _fuck _if it doesn't completely do it for him anyway.

The black jacket drapes off her shoulders and swoops in toward her waist perfectly, highlighting the silky red button-down that lies beneath it, but it's the skirt, the damn pencil skirt that ends (perfectly professionally) at the center of her knee that's doing him in, the long stretch of her legs before the sharp angles of her pumps. It's not that he hasn't seen a woman's calves before, it's not that he hasn't seen _her_ calves before, but he's not used to it at the precinct, and all the sudden all he can think about is the last time he saw her legs, how the muscles of her calves and thighs rippled underneath his lips as he slowly kissed his way up her body.

One time with Kate Beckett was absolutely not enough.

"Well," Castle says, trying to tamp down on the uncomfortable churn of lust and jealousy deep within his chest. "Gotta hand it to Cromwell, he sure does know your size."

She shakes her head at him. "Castle," she breathes. The sudden lack of fight in her makes him feel it more than anything else – two weeks of trial prep with Cromwell, the superstar prosecutor with the chiseled features and the sculpted body, and now he's buying her clothing because he _owes it to her_ and she's smiling at him and calling him _Sam_.

"I get it," he says, a little sharp, almost succeeding in covering up the hurt edge to his tone.

She sinks down in her chair, crossing her legs, and even now, even now he can't keep himself from staring as the hem of the skirt rides up, exposes a smooth inch of her thigh, even now he can't stop the hot coil of desire from winding tightly in his stomach. "You're jumping to conclusions," she says.

"You slept with him," Castle blurts suddenly, idiotically, because that's all he can think.

But then her teeth slide over her lower lip and she looks away from him and holy hell, even as he thought it, even as he said it, he didn't think it was really _true_. His eyes drop back down to the hem of the skirt, to the hint of thigh that he still can't stop himself from wanting, will never be able to stop himself from wanting.

"Okay," he says, trying not to sound like he's been sucker punched in in the stomach. She leans forward, rests her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands. The action causes the skirt to shift up another centimeter. His want burns in his throat, behind his eyes, a painful thing now.

"I was in Vice," she says. "I hadn't been with the NYPD that long. Things were – different, then. I was different."

The knowledge wraps around him, settles warmly over him – Vice, she was in Vice almost a decade ago, and she's running at a very different punch line than the one he's been imagining. He tilts toward her, relief buzzing through his blood, and lets her words pull him in. People say that he's a good storyteller, and he is, he supposes, but he has nothing on her, the cautious, almost clinical way she dispenses information, the careful cadence of her sentences. His only complaint is that she stops too soon, but it's impossible for her not to; he will never get enough of her.

"I met him the first time I had to testify. Sam was clerking in the DA's office." She shrugs. "He – he was getting over things in his own life. Neither of us wanted more than what we had."

"Which was?" he asks.

She smiles at him, her eyes dark. "Recreational." She pauses for a beat, her eyes flicking over his face. "You didn't really think…" she starts, trailing off.

He shrugs, tries to play it off. "We haven't really – talked," he says. "And then you have handsome prosecutors coming in, telling you they owe you sets of clothing."

She rolls her eyes. "I don't know how many years ago - I'd just come off a quick undercover op that'd gotten a little – stressful. I went to Sam's to release some excess energy. I was wearing a dress that was… tricky to remove. Luckily, my clothing was the only casualty that night."

It's almost painful, the combination of desire and jealousy and ridiculous admiration he feels, picturing Beckett, twenty-five, barely-there dress plastered onto her lithe body, getting into fistfights and gunfights in the middle of seedy clubs. "I wish I'd known you back then," he says.

"You don't," she murmurs. "I wasn't always… easy." He can't help but laugh a little. She smiles. "Worse than now."

"I like that you're not easy," he says, taking the edge off the sincerity of his words with a leer.

She rolls her eyes, arches her back, stretching her arms above her head. Something about the way she shifts pulls the skirt up another inch, and he's back to staring at her thighs and then she's staring at him staring at her thighs and he wishes that he were more like stupid Sam with his chiseled jaw who got to meet Beckett years and years and years before Castle ever laid eyes on her. She lowers her arms, stares at her watch. "I gotta go," she says. "You gonna go home, get some rest?"

"Oh, oh no," he responds in a rush. "There's no way I'd miss this. Nothing like the thrill of a trial, I say."

She stares at him. "That is the exact opposite of what you say."

He decides to play dumb. "What?"

"The last time you came to court with me you drained your battery playing Angry Birds for two hours and then spent the rest of time quietly muttering about how justified you were writing about detective work and how Grisham and anyone else who thinks that court is exciting should go hang themselves."

"This trial, though," he says, bobbing his head and trying to tear his eyes off her legs. "This trial is different. The um – the –" she shifts, uncrosses her legs for a moment. "The guy."

"Lapinski," she says, the edge of a wry smile on her voice.

"Right." He swallows. He can see, tops, two inches of thigh above her knee. He has seen all of her, now. There is no reason for him to be an incoherent mess at the sight of her smooth skin, the firm curve of her quad that he wants nothing more than to trace up and up with his tongue. "Him. Fascinating case. Trial of the – of the year. Decade."

"Stop staring at my legs, Castle," she says.

She gets up, starts walking towards the exit, and it's all Castle can do to trail helplessly after her.

The elevator door opens and Esposito steps out. He gives Beckett a once-over and smirks. "Who dressed you like a girl today?"

She grins. "I'll send him over to your place later, find you something to make you feel pretty."

Esposito shakes his head. "We got a weird one, Castle – double homicide in the basement of The Strand. You in?" Beckett's opening her mouth to ask for details, but Espo clucks at her. "Nothing else for you, you'll get stuck here and I don't want Cromwell pissed at me."

Beckett glares, but her eyes soften as she turns toward Castle. "Go ahead," she says, her voice quiet, encouraging, giving him an out. "Think of all the literary possibilities."

Any other day and he'd be all atwitter about a murder in a bookstore, but right now – "No, today is the day I find my inner Grisham."

Esposito rolls his eyes. "You literally grimaced when you said Grisham's name."

"You have mistaken a grimace for an expression of reverence for the art of writing about a trial."

"Or Beckett in a skirt at a trial," Esposito says smugly. Then, seeing the look on Beckett's face, he schools his expression carefully neutral and quickly walks to his desk.

"So," she says in the elevator. "You've seen me in a dress before. You've seen me in several dresses. And you've seen me in nothing at all."

He swallows, closing his eyes briefly to absorb the way she's just openly admitted that he has _seen her naked._

"It's just a pencil skirt, Castle. Are you that easy?"

He edges closer to her, risks trailing a finger over the sleek fabric at her hip. She draws in a sharp breath. He reminds himself to keep alert: it's the precinct elevator, after all, and she might just be preparing to eviscerate him. "I am for you," he whispers near her ear, relishing the tiny shiver that he can just barely see drill down her spine.

She shoves him away, a little too hard to be entirely disaffected. "I'll keep it in mind the next time you're too busy playing Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty on your phone to help me with the paperwork."

He shifts a little closer, leans over to whisper in her ear, "Do you know how _hot _it is to hear you say _Sentinel of Liberty_?"

She levels him with a glare, but there's a flush just at the base of her neck that she can't hide. "Tell you what," she says, leaning back to look into his eyes. "You stay on your best behavior at the trial, tonight you can practice some of the combat moves live."

He stares at her, his heart suddenly thumping erratically somewhere at the bottom of his esophagus, trying not to let too much naked hope shine through in his expression. He should ask follow up questions. Her place? His place? What time? Is she actually inviting him to spar at the precinct? Because that would not be – oh, no, the thought of her, sweaty and in a tank top and grappling with him, that would be fine, actually. He realizes his eyes have probably become entirely unfocused and he still hasn't accomplished any sort of response. "Okay," he manages, trying not to let his voice cant up too many octaves.

And then, before he can follow up at all, the elevator doors open and she's _sauntering _away with her heels and her skirt and her long lean calves and oh, is this ever going to be a long day in court.


	2. Easy Access 2

The trial, it turns out, is far less boring than he thought it would be.

He can't remember what was going on with the case the last time he followed Beckett to court, but he _does_ remember that they weren't letting witnesses into the room until it was their turn to testify, and he spent the majority of the day listening to the overweight defense attorney drone on and on, questioning people far less articulate and far less attractive than Beckett.

Cromwell meets them just after security, fifteen minutes before the trial. "You're good to be in the courtroom, today," he says, his eyes running over her body, lingering a little on the curves of her torso, the sleek lines of her calves. "Nice suit," he says.

Beckett chuffs. "Stop flattering yourself."

Castle wants to punch the stupid smug smile right off Cromwell's face. He settles, again, for stepping a little closer to Beckett. Cromwell stares at him, a look that's part assessment, part challenge.

Becket glances between them, rolls her eyes, and walks toward the courtroom. Castle and Cromwell share an awkward breath as Castle starts constructing a carefully-worded speech about valor and honor and the giving up of recreational sexual relationships in the face of an eternal undying love. He's glaring at Cromwell, his brain just working through a tricky bit (_sometimes, in the course of one's sexual history, it becomes necessary for one person to dissolve a carnal relationship_), when he hears Beckett's voice. "Come _on_," she's tossing over her shoulder.

He and Cromwell immediately trail after. He realizes they're unconsciously in sync. He resists the urge to stick out a leg and trip him.

They're early. He and Beckett slide in just behind the bar. Just like at the precinct, he can see an inch of her thigh when he glances down. It doesn't make it any less hot now that they're in court.

But then Cromwell's turning around asking, "So, you really think the easiest way to get Latriski to roll would be to bring his brother's timeline into it? Because that's a tricky line to play with Cravitz," and Castle doesn't _know _these people, and Cromwell is still looking at Beckett like he is someone who is allowed to _buy her clothing_, and he's back to trying to soothe himself all over again.

To her credit, Beckett's entirely professional with Cromwell, a little cooler, even, since Castle's minor outburst in the precinct, but he hates being left out, hates when he can't theorize with her, hates that she's building any kind of case with anybody else.

He mentally goes back to his speech. It's tricky, but he's gotten most of the way through (_I have conjured you by the ties of our common manhood to disavow this relationship) _when he realizes Cromwell's turned back around stopped talking, and Beckett's staring. "You okay, Castle?"

"Hmm?" he murmurs.

"Seems like you were in your own little world for a minute."

"Yeah, just –" he flaps his hand vaguely. "The Declaration of Independence."

Beckett's brow furrows. "It may not have been a good idea for you to come to court jetlagged. Are you sure you don't want to go get some rest?"

There's something in her tone, a layer of _Don't want to be tired for tonight _that he _really_ doesn't think he's just hoping into it, but the thought of abandoning her to Cromwell is enough to make him panic. "No, I'm great. Lots of literary inspiration here." He pauses, eyes flicking over her. "How plausible do you think it would be for Nikki to have a long-lost twin who works in a university library and has a penchant for pencil skirts and romance novels?"

Something about how still she suddenly becomes lets him know that voicing that last part aloud wasn't the best idea he's ever had. Her index finger taps once, twice, three times against her bare knee, like she's considering all the possible ways to maim him with just that one digit.

"Kidding?" he offers weakly.

"Thought so," she says, and then, thank God, Judge Cravitz is walking into the room and all are rising and all are sitting and then Sam is spinning some opening statement in a commanding voice to a dozen rapt jury members. He wants to focus, wants to hone in on the words, wants to pick up pieces of the case and see if he can offer any last minute advice, but he can't devote any of his brain to anything but Beckett. She's observing with a kind of quiet intensity he rarely gets to see in her, a passive kind of passion that at first makes his insides roil with jealousy until he gradually pulls it apart. It's not about Cromwell, or any one person. It's the bare tones of the courthouse: the lilt and rise and fall of Cromwell's voice, yes, but also the quiet, attentive breathing of the audience, the silky shift of Cravitz's robes, the occasionally low hum of assent from one of the young female jury members. This was almost her job, once, this was almost her life, and for some reason today she's not trying to hide just how fascinated she is by all of it.

Cromwell sits, and the defense begins, an older woman with a cutting voice and a harsh, commanding presence. Again, he can't quite bring himself to care, not when Beckett's looking like this. Her eyes have this spark in them, and the slender column of her throat arcs _just so_ when someone makes a particularly good point, and sometimes, every so often, she'll shift and cross her legs and the skirt will slide along her skin and he'll have to remind himself to continue to inhale, because there is absolutely no way he will allow himself to die before their Combat Moves Live date.

The first witness is a man with a sharp nose and an awful stutter, and even Beckett's attention fades. Her eyes flick over the jury, the defense table, and finally Cromwell, her gaze settling on the back of his head, and oh, no, he understands the man can spin a mean opening statement and has impeccable taste in women's suiting, but this simply will not do.

Before he can think better of it, he inches a finger over and slides it onto the outside of her lower thigh. He can't help the instant where he mentally praises Cromwell for lacking the foresight to provide any kind of pantyhose; her skin is gloriously bare and warm and supple beneath him, and then there's the leap and jump of her muscles as she hisses "_Castle_" underneath her breath.

In an utterly fascinating development, she's not disemboweling him or jerking sharply away. He glances around, but they're sitting directly next to one another and, short of someone in the row behind them suddenly jumping up, nobody has a good line of sight to their laps. He trails his finger in a small circle, once, then again.

And ouch, there it is, she's reached down and flicked his knuckle, _hard_, before he could even begin to anticipate it, but as she's doing that there's the tiniest hitch to her breathing. "I don't like it _that _rough," he whispers, because it really does sting and honesty is the best policy in cases like this and he figures it's best to set boundaries at first in what he's sure will be a long-lasting relationship. He fights through the pain like a man and leaves his fingers resolutely on her thigh.

"Shhhhhhhhhhhh," she hisses.

He leans over, drops his whisper down to just a breath of air. "Can you make that noise again? You're helping Nikki's Naughty Librarian twin come to life right now. I think her name will be Nicolette."

"We are in _court_, shut _up_," she growls, but a little too loudly, and Cromwell's turning around and shooting her a look that's all incredulity. He thinks that the flush that's creeping into her cheeks is probably only partially made up of arousal, since the glare she shoots him seems to be mostly composed of pure rage.

He slides his hand to the top of her thigh. Her muscles ripple tightly, but he's fairly certain she won't make a sound or do anything horrible enough to him that _he_ would make a sound. He trails his fingers lightly over her skin, reveling the barely-there hitch of her breath, in the way her fingers twitch tensely on her lap.

He lets his hand slip up a little higher, until he hits the sleek fabric of the skirt, and then he slides his pinky up and under it, flattens his palm against her hot skin. Her jaw tightens; her shoulders jolt almost imperceptibly. She's staring intensely at the jury, but her eyes are unfocused, and he'd bet someone a nice hunk of his Derrick Storm profits that she has very little idea about what's happening in the trial right now.

All from his hand on her thigh.

The thought sends a shiver through him, makes his pants tighten in a not-yet-unpleasant way, and he chances sneaking his ring and pinkie fingers another inch up under her skirt.

She inhales long and low and slow, her chest rising and falling beneath the tailored suit. He has to forcibly drag his eyes away from her. His gaze trips over the back of Cromwell's head, and he can't help but swell with an odd kind of pride. _You might have bought the skirt, but you're not the one with your hand up it, you smug bastard_.

Beckett lets out a tiny sigh. This is an infinitely improved court experience. Grisham might have been onto something after all.

And then all the sudden everyone in front of the bar is yelling – the witness is jumping up from the stand and screaming at Lapinski and the court police are running forward and the Defender is yelling "Objection" and Cravitz is banging his gavel and shouting about hooligans (_Hooligans?_ _What?) _in his court room. Castle yanks his hand off her leg like it burns him.

He tries to get over the initial shock of it all, tries to quiet the sudden pound of his heart in his sternum from the startling commotion. He leans over to speak into her ear. "Does this happen often in court? I've been _missing out._"

She opens her mouth to respond (and oh, the way her lips part slightly, moist and inviting, maybe he shouldn't find it so titillating but it's impossible not to when he's so close to her; it's been two weeks since the second time he's ever tasted her mouth and he wants her so badly it burns), but right as she does the Cravitz yells, "Twenty minute recess!"

"Fun day already," Cromwell says, turning and smiling at Beckett.

Castle tries not to bristle about how happy the man is: between buying an admittedly delectable suit for the hottest woman to step into this courtroom and the meltdown of one of the defense's witnesses, he might have a right to his smile, but does he really need to turn it on Beckett like that?

She quirks half a grin back at Cromwell, then turns to Castle. "I'm going to the bathroom," she says, lifting an eyebrow at him and then walking away.

He stays pinned to his seat for a minute by that eyebrow. Was she making a subtle commentary on the ridiculous state of the courtroom? Was she trying to let him know Cromwell wasn't a real threat? But no, no, no matter how he replays it, that eyebrow is saying _follow me, follow me. _He hopes.

He jumps to his feet before he can convince himself not to, hits the entrance to the courtroom, and halts dead. If she _was_ asking him to follow her (and she can't have been, can't have been, he must be _insane,_ but he'd be even more crazy if he never tried to find out), there's a unisex stall somewhere – somewhere left.

He finally finds it right on the edge of security, tests the handle, raps firmly on the door with his knuckles. It immediately swings open, and then there's a hand on the collar of his shirt _dragging_ him into the room and he sends up a brief prayer that it's Beckett, because if it isn't then he's most likely about to be brutally murdered.

"Took you long enough," she growls into his mouth, scraping her teeth over his lips as she reaches behind him and flips the lock.

"Ummmmmm," he manages to hum into her kiss, his hands smoothing over her cheek, her neck, up between her jacket and her shirt, anywhere he can touch her.

She breaks away, glances briefly down at her watch. "We have thirteen minutes," she says, tilting her body so that her hips are pressed up against his leg and she's subtly rolling her pelvis in a way that will take him an entire lifetime to forget.

He drops his head to her neck while his fingers work at the button of her blazer and then the top two buttons of her blouse, just enough to give him a little more access, and then he's kissing down her neck and running his teeth over the sharp ridge of her collarbone and she's exhaling in this breathy way that _absolutely _does it for him in every way imaginable. "So," he murmurs, sure she can feel his smile, "Did you miss me?"

"No," she grits out as he untucks her blouse, runs his finger along the rippling muscles of her abdomen, dips below the waistband of the skirt.

"Okay," he says, stilling his hand and mouth against her.

She growls darkly in frustration. "We have _ten minutes_. I _know _you are not _playing games with me right now_."

He keeps his left hand on her hip, digging into the skin hard enough to bruise, and drops the right one to her leg, just below her skirt, starts trailing it lightly up the inside of her thigh. "Who's playing games, Beckett? I was just asking if you missed me." He tilts forward, draws her earlobe into his mouth, bites down gently. "I missed you, you know," he rumbles. "I missed you a lot."

He slides his hand up, and the breathy moan that escapes her, God, ten minutes, probably nine now, is not _nearly _enough time. A lifetime is not nearly enough time.

His fingers hit the crease of her thigh and she's biting down hard on his shoulder, through his dress shirt, hard enough that it's going to bruise tomorrow, and the spark of pain jerks his body into more action. He drags her skirt up, nudges her legs apart, sucks hard on the edge of her clavicle.

"Richard Castle," she gasps against his neck, her voice dripping with so much arousal that his hips jerk reflexively. "I still have to testify. If you wrinkle this skirt I will _castrate _you."

He stills again. "Are you really talking about castrating me at a time like this?"

"_Yes_," she hisses, digging her nails into his back.

He stays still. "We have, what, seven minutes? I was just trying to speed the process along." He slowly, deliberately lifts his hand between her legs, trails a finger lightly over the dampness of her underwear.

She gasps. "God, never mind, wrinkle it, I don't _care_, just _move_," she growls.

He tries to shove the skirt higher, up around her hips, but the fabric has no give and it fits her so well and her legs are spread enough that it's not moving. "Stuck," he groans into her ear. "I _hate _pencil skirts." He tries in vain to work the fabric over her hips. "Nicolette's going to wear miniskirts instead. Or sarongs," he says against her jaw. "Maybe she'll be a Tahitian librarian."

"Are you _kidding me_," she snarls, twisting and wriggling and dropping a hand to help him until she has the freedom to lean her shoulders back against the wall and twine one leg up around his and he can _finally_ slide his hand underneath her underwear, the slippery fabric on one side of his fingers, the slick warmth of her on the other.

She drops her head back, exhales in a sobbing gasp that he revels in for an instant before he remembers where they are. "Beckett," he says, but they have maybe four minutes now and he's far too far gone to create coherent sentences. "Shhhhh," is all he can finally get out, but there's no _time _and all he can do is slide a finger into her and circle his thumb over her and she's _moaning _so loudly that it's _echoing _through the tiny room and he thought it was impossible but he's even harder now and oh, oh, they are in _court_ and she _cannot _make these noises.

He lifts his left hand, presses it firmly against her mouth so that they at least have a prayer of not getting arrested for some kind of public indecency (although if Cromwell saw them being led away in handcuffs together it would be _nearly_ worth it), and damn if it doesn't do that for her even more, because suddenly her hips are pumping frantically against him and she's sobbing broken incoherent words into his palm and wrapping her fingers around his neck and practically _climbing up his body _before she finally comes down, chest heaving, muscles trembling.

He gulps, tries to compose himself, runs the hand that was covering her mouth through her hair as she drops her head briefly to his shoulder. He twists his wrist briefly to check his watch. "And we still have a minute left," he says. He'd been going for jovial, but his voice comes out hoarse, strained.

She lifts a hand, pats his chest and then pushes off of him to stand on still-shaky legs. She glances down sympathetically. "You might want to carry your jacket in front of you," she murmurs, smiling in a way that is the _opposite _of innocent. She pulls down her skirt, shakes out her hair, takes a deep breath and squares up her shoulders, and damn if suddenly the only evidence left on her isn't the slightest swelling of her lips and glinting in her eyes. "I'll make it worth your while tonight."

"That is _not _a thought that will help me," he says, leaning forward, crashing his lips into hers in a brief, harsh kiss.

And then she's brushing her thumb over his chin and smiling at him sinfully and flipping the lock and sauntering out of the bathroom.

He twists the lock back, leans his forehead against the door as he tries to compose himself. But no, okay, she was right, he's not going to be _composed_ again until probably next week at the earliest. He washes his hands, takes his jacket off, sighs deeply, and steps through the door.

Cromwell is standing right there.

"Oh," Castle says, fingers clutching his jacket tightly. Could he be any more obvious? "Um. Court?"

"Right," Cromwell says, looking nearly as flustered as Castle feels. "They – Cravitz that is – we took another ten minutes."

"Are you _fucking serious_," Castle growls under his breath. The things they could have _done _with another ten minutes.

"What?" Cromwell asks, tilting his head.

Castle pastes on what he hopes is a sunny smile but which he has to admit probably looks more like he is in the midst of some type of horrible death throe. "Nothing," he grits out. "Nothing at all."

"So," Cromwell says, gesturing. "You and…" he trails off, like maybe saying her name will make it real.

"Yup," Castle responds.

"Right," Cromwell says, and he seems to be taking it mostly graciously. "Sorry about that whole – skirt thing."

"You know what?" Castle can't help but smile, and all of the sudden he decides that Cromwell's not really such a bad guy after all. "Don't worry about it."

* * *

___Extra special thanks to Cora Clavia, whose dedications I will never in a million billion trillion years be able to match and who is entirely responsible for this fic, to Sandiane Carter and chezchukles and shimmeryshine, for talking me through my incessant ridiculousness, and to all the utterly wonderful people who left reviews and encouraged me to not run and hide under a gigantic rock because I am still abnormally terrified of writing M fic._


	3. Combat Moves

It truly takes a village (of screaming people with torches and pitchforks) to get me to write and post M fic, but extra special thanks to Laura, for forcing me to write this in the first place, to Julie and Nic for making me write in actual words and sentences, and to everyone else, especially Molly and Sarah, who relentlessly, terrifyingly encouraged me.

* * *

He shows up at her door five minutes early, clutching a bottle of wine in one hand and an oversized cactus in the other, sure that he's going to sweat all the way through his button-down.

He'd left the loft early because he couldn't sit still, and for some reason he'd impulsively decided that it would be better to be jittery outside Beckett's apartment than sitting on a stool in his kitchen, desperately trying to keep himself from pouring another glass of scotch to take the edge off. He'd sworn, he'd _sworn _to himself that just because he was leaving early, under no circumstance would he procure any type of floral arrangement.

He's not sure of very much in life, but he's fairly positive that when Beckett invited him to her apartment to practice combat moves, it was not a bring-a-flower kind of date, or possibly any kind of date at all.

But then Broadway was jammed and the cabbie'd swung onto 6th and suddenly he could see the sign for Paradise Plants and from then on it was an out-of-body experience, a jumble of _Stop the cab! _and tripping quickly down the street and before he knew it, he was standing in the middle of a collection of exotic trees discussing Beckett's work schedule and lack of ability to keep plants alive with Janelle, a rather fierce-looking young woman with a nose ring.

He shifts uncomfortably, wishing his hands weren't occupied so he could tug at his collar. It is _impossible _to look debonair while holding a two-foot-tall golden barrel cactus.

A quick check of his watch – only two minutes early, now - and he's rapping the bottom of the wine bottle against the door in an odd kind of knock before he can talk himself out of it.

The door swings open almost immediately. "Hey, Beckett," he says, a little too quickly, peering at her from over a collection of golden needles. She's wearing yoga pants and a strappy camisole and no shoes. Her hair is up in a ponytail, but tendrils are falling around her neck.

She gives him a quizzical smile. "Is that a cactus?"

"Yeah. For you," he says, like there's a chance he would be standing in her doorway clutching a ridiculously large houseplant that he'd purchased for Alexis.

"Thanks." She reaches out with both hands and takes it hesitantly, then seems to remember that he's standing there awkwardly in the hallway. "Come in," she says, stepping back.

He steps inside and closes the door behind him, watching her regard the cactus warily. He feels a sudden surge of panic. He hopes she doesn't think it's a _thank-you-for-letting-me-get-you-off-in-a-courthouse-bathroom _cactus, or, maybe even worse, a _thank-you-for-banging-my-brains-out-before-I-left-on-that-booktour-and-I'm-sorry-we-haven't-really-openly-discussed-that-yet _cactus.

"You dressed for sparring?" she asks skeptically as she moves to put the plant on the kitchen counter.

"Uh." He is absolutely certain that the correct response is not _I wasn't sure if that was just a flimsy excuse for us to have more hot sex, so I didn't want to show up in sweats_. "Figured I'd keep it close to a work outfit. Since that's when I'll be exercising my newfound ability to perform superhero takedowns."

She arches an eyebrow. He's sure she can see straight through him.

He glances over at the cactus sitting on the kitchen counter. "She needs a warm, slightly sunny area. You only have to water her every few weeks. She's supposed to be one of the easiest keepers."

Beckett blinks at him. "Are you anthropomorphizing my cactus?"

"Just because she's prickly doesn't mean she doesn't need love."

She levels him with a suddenly-intense stare. "That supposed to be a metaphor?"

"No," he says reflexively, swallowing. "No, no." He feels the need to emphasize this point. "No."

Her lips twitch ever-so-slightly.

"Oh. Hey, that's not nice, messing with me when all I've done is bring you a cactus."

"Don't make it so easy, then."

_Speaking of easy, why'd you change out of the skirt?_ his brain supplies, but he just manages to swallow back the most offensive part. "You changed," he says.

She narrows her eyes like she can actually see the mental acrobatics he jumped through to get from easy to her change of outfit. "_I _decided to be prepared," she retorts archly. The way she pops the _p_s in the word makes him actually twitch, and she grins again, dark and feral.

Okay. Okay. He needs to collect himself, to at least pretend he's self-possessed. They've been together twice so far, he reminds himself, and the first time she shuddered apart under his fingers and mouth and body three times, and the second time it took very little to get her moaning against him in a tiny bathroom, and really, he's not just a bumbling, cactus-bearing idiot. He's got game. He does.

He steps forward, edging brazenly into her personal space. With her bare feet, she's half a foot shorter than him. He uses that to his advantage like he usually never would, crowding his bulk further into her space as he reaches out a hand and plucks at the thin strap of her camisole. His fingers graze her clavicle, and he can't help but let his hand pause there, just barely brushing the heat of her bare skin. "You usually spar in this?" he asks, his tone half an octave lower than he'd been aiming.

Her tongue slowly slides over her lips before she blinks, juts her chin up so her neck is bent back and her gaze is locked with his. She doesn't take a step backwards. "No," she says. Only she could make that one syllable sound like such a fucking come on.

It's totally out of his control when his gaze trips away from her eyes and down her shirt. "Jesus, Beckett, you really don't have a bra on, do you?"

A slow smile spreads across her lips. "There's built in support, and where are you looking?"

He's never been so turned on by a camisole in his life. "I don't mind that you changed anymore," he tells her, inching slightly closer, and then the walls and ceiling are spinning around and his knees hit the ground with a sharp crack and his left shoulder feels like someone just about ripped it out of the socket. "Oh God, am I dead?" he groans between pathetic gasps for breath. He arches his back and tilts his head all the way up to look at Beckett, who's standing over him, glaring down.

"You think it's cute that you're taller than me?" Her eyes are an absolutely intoxicating combination of irritation and what he's fairly sure could be lust.

He totally voluntarily chooses to stay on his knees for another minute. "Point taken. Also, shouldn't you have told me before we started sparring?"

"First rule of sparring is to always be prepared."

"It's not the Boy Scouts, Beckett," he says, and then executes what he thinks is a pretty tricky maneuver, reaching back and wrapping both hands around her calves in a move that he somehow envisions will land her neatly on the floor in front of him. He'll straddle her and have her pinned, he'll have won the sparring match, and he'll be rewarded with a round of incredibly energetic lovemaking fueled by her total reverence for his combat prowess.

Unfortunately, the takedown is a bit sloppier than he'd originally anticipated, and after a brief tangle of elbows and knees and ribs from which he thinks his solar plexus may not have emerged completely whole, he winds up horizontal and staring up at her, yet again.

It's not an entirely lost cause, though, because somehow she's lying flush against him, her hipbones pressing against his, and her hands are circled around his wrists, which are pinned lightly above his head. He swallows and stares at the ceiling for a minute, trying to get some kind of control, but there is absolutely no _way_ she can't feel how this is affecting him.

She grins down at him, her gaze flicking to his lips before trailing back up to his eyes. "Everything okay there, Castle?" She looks so very smug.

_Perfectly natural reaction_, he consoles himself. He decides he might as well try to use his little problem to his advantage. "Did you know that in jiu-jitsu, they call sparring 'rolling?'" he asks, punctuating the last word with a long, slow roll of his hips up against hers.

"Fascinating," she says drolly, her tone not giving anything away, but her fingers tighten around his wrists, her nails biting into his skin as her pupils dilate slightly.

He shifts his hips slightly down and to the right, rolls his body again up into hers with a little more intention, revels in her slow hiss of air and the too-long blink of her eyes.

His brief sense of victory threatens to stretch itself into a smile, but he manages to swallow it, slowly swiveling the right side of his pelvis into the air, rolling them over so that he's lying on top of her. Her hands are still circled around his forearms, but she doesn't fight when he shifts, drags his wrists out of her grip and presses her hands into the floor with his palms, and here's a glimpse of the Beckett he saw earlier in the courthouse bathroom, the Beckett who _climbed up his body _when he clasped his hand firmly over her mouth.

"Stop looking so pleased with yourself," she growls, but her body keeps shifting, a liquid roll and sway that has her hipbone grinding in a deliciously abrasive way up into him and he can't do anything but let his torso press down against hers, revel in the softness of her chest, the heat of her abdomen that radiates through her thin camisole.

"Then stop looking so irresistible," he rumbles at her.

A laugh shivers across her face and through her body, making her ripple against him in an entirely-too-pleasant way. "Are you serious?" she teases, her eyes sparkling, her lips quirked into a brilliant, teasing smile. "_That's _your play?"

Her laugh turns into a quickly indrawn breath when he rotates his hips over, shifting his body until their pelvises align. He just manages to catch a moan in the back of his throat, gulping it down in a rush of air. "You're in an interesting position to be mocking me right now, Beckett," he says, punctuating her name with an aggressive roll of his hips.

She curls her neck forward, sinks her teeth sharply into the juncture of his neck and shoulder as she widens her thighs, letting his body settle further against hers. This time, he can't quite swallow his groan. "I don't like to lose," she husks, and it takes his addled brain a moment to catch up with hers. Sparring. Right. They are sparring.

"Call it a draw?" he suggests, his skin tingling, his abdomen coiled with such tightly wound want that it _aches_.

She lets her head fall back onto the floor. "That's the same as losing," she huffs against his mouth. Jerking one wrist out of his grasp, she bucks up with her hips and then drops back down, creating an inch of space between them and sneaking her deft fingers into it. She works at the button of his pants, trails her hand below his waistband.

"Win," he gasps as her palm closes firmly around him, "you win. You win."

"You're so _easy,_" she murmurs. He manages not to whimper when she releases him, but only because she's immediately using her hand to work down the zipper of his jeans.

"For you," he says, like it's any kind of news. "Especially when you have a hand down my pants."

"But what's my prize?" she asks, batting her eyes at him in a mockery of coyness, skidding her teeth over her lower lip. But then her blinks slow, stop, and her hand steadies, and their bodies still entirely for the first time since he's walked in the door. He can feel it between them, a sharply crackling current that's setting him painfully, excruciatingly on edge.

He's not sure who breaks first, only that they suddenly dissolve into a flurry of arms and hands, her fingers pushing his pants over his hips as his palms skid under her shirt, dragging over the ridges of her spine, catching her yoga pants and pulling them down, down over her hips. Suddenly she's pushing at his boxers and working her legs underneath him to toe her pants off and he's wedging his hand back between their torsos, his forearm torqueing at a horribly uncomfortable angle that he can't even begin to worry about once his fingers hit the slickness between her legs. "I think you got your prize preemptively in that courtroom bathroom," he grunts, tracing a firm circle over her.

She draws a knee up, uses her heel to kick him in the back of his thigh, growls low at him from the back of her throat. "I'm ready for another one," she says, dragging his hand off of her and then wrapping her fingers around him again, guiding him slowly further between her legs.

"Happy to ob – fuck, fuck Beckett," he grits out as she suddenly slams her hips up to crash him all the way inside her. He drops his forehead down onto her temple, his mouth working against her jawbone as his pelvis sets up a quick counterpoint to hers. Her breath is coming in short, sharp pants, and when he snakes a hand between them to trace quick circles over her she starts up with a series of low, needy keens in the back of her throat and it's all too criminally wonderful, especially when she draws her knee higher and he's driving even deeper into the cradle of her hips.

Her breath stutters as her body jerks and she's suddenly clamping around him, making his rhythm grow even more frantic. He tries to slow for her, give her a chance to come down from it, to let her tingling nerves readjust, but she's tightening her thighs around him already, working for him, shaking through the aftershocks to give him what he needs, and damn it if he doesn't already feel the coil of tightness spark and release, damn it if he doesn't feel a sudden lump in his throat for all the different ways she shows him how she feels.

They lie in a tangle of trembling muscles and damp skin for a moment, breathing in and out together, before he feels her start to tense beneath him. "We should –" she starts, but lets it spin off into the dark air of her apartment.

"Yeah," he says, forcing himself to press up and back, standing on legs that are embarrassingly wobbly and pulling his pants back up with trembling fingers. He finds some consolation in the dizzy, hazed look in her eyes when she stumbles up beside him.

He wants to ask to stay.

He doesn't want to push.

He won't let himself watch her as she pulls her yoga pants back on, instead forcing his eyes to drift over to the kitchen. "She might need a little more sun," he murmurs absently, his gaze tripping over the spines of the cactus, his brain still stuttering over the memory of the soft yield of her body.

"Hm?" she hums, low in her throat, a noise he hears but doesn't quite process. "What?" she asks, enough to startle him back into awareness.

"The cactus," he tries to explain. "Don't know how much sun the middle of the counter will get." _Also, I love you, _he adds mentally, tries to convey the sentiment with the angle of his head and the squint of his eyes.

"Right." She lets herself drift slightly toward the door.

He follows. He can take a cue.

"You're a pretty good sparring partner," she says.

"More satisfying than usual?"

"I wouldn't go _that_ far."

"Well. Now that the challenge has been established…" he says, but lets it trail off. He's not going to presume with her, not going to start to wreck it before they can even get it off the ground.

She smiles at him, enough of an acknowledgement. "Thanks for the cactus, Castle," she says as she opens the door.

He leans forward, captures her lips in a fast, open-mouth kiss. "Thanks for the mind-blowing sex," he growls as he steps into the hallway.

He doesn't turn as he walks away, doesn't want to see the hesitation or the doubt on her face, doesn't want to seem like the needy kind of guy who can't be trusted to remain emotionally stable after a quick session of sparring sex.

He slumps against the wall of her elevator, squeezes his eyes shut for a beat, can't help but jerk out his cell phone, stare at her number.

_Hope you don't use those defense moves on everyone_, he texts, so far away from everything he wants to say.

His phone vibrates as he steps out of the building into the chilled, early morning darkness, and he can't help but smile.

_Only you. _


End file.
